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by 21asdffdsa12 11 days ago
Actually- there is.. if you give up on the idea of "stopping at the station".. you just pick up a car that raced ahead and up to speed- and drop a car that gets left behind and pulls into the station.. okay maybe not with the UK-Rail..

Basically the train never stops- it just reorganizes.

2 comments

Let's say you managed this. Say you designed trains and safety protocols for coupling/decoupling at 100mph, completely reconfigure the signalling system, solve the inevitable accessibility issues for embarking the fast train... You still have 100 tonne vehicles that need conflict management between different finite sets of steel rails. And all of those other things would need physical reconfiguration as well.
....wot
Despite how mad this sounds, a smaller variant was actually tried at the peak of French techno-optimism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis_(personal_rapid_transit...

(obviously this is something that, even if you could get it to work for large 100mph trains, is going to be horrifically vulnerable to the first accident)